What do you consider “home”? The place you grew up? Where you went to school? Or were you a wandering soul that never put down roots? “Home” is a very difficult concept to define with any kind of objectivity or certainty. I would love to idealize this all out of proportion, but that would be too easy. The truth of the matter is highly complex and chaotic. One can spend an inordinate amount of time in a place and never feel at home, but even just a few days might suffice to convince you that a new place is really where your heart is at. I think that home must have something to do with the heart or the soul or some other ephemeral and subjective criteria that is completely irrational and totally inexplicable. We know we are home when we get there, and we also know when we are long way from home. Perhaps the concept of home is forged in our hearts when we are young and impressionable, when we are vulnerable and need protecting, forged by a sturdy roof over our heads and a warm meal on the table where we are always welcome any time of the day or night. Or maybe it’s none of that. At some point in our lives we forge an identity, we come to recognize ourselves as proceeding from some place, and when asked where we are from, we name a place. We spend most of our lives leaving home, moving out, living far away, yearning for that comfort and safety that we felt as children when we were being watched over. The nostalgia we feel for home is never felt so keenly as when we most go to some place foreign for work or school or whatever avatars and caprices befall one in the normal course of a life. We spend all of our time trying to get away from home, remake our identifies as adults, take our philosophies new and unknown places, make a living, create a new home for our family in an unfamiliar setting. And we live our lives far away from our homes. I often get the feeling that contemporary society is less and less concerned with a person’s hometown, an idea which is being washed away by the increasing mobility of every level of society. Many, many people no longer identify any place as home, which makes me wonder, have we gained a more universal identity or have we lost something very essential, something important. Paradoxically, going home is a risky venture if there ever was one. One is a child at home, and as one moves away, one establishes a new identity, but as we go back, we put on our old clothes and become a child again. Of course, we also run the risk of realizing how small our home town really is, how short the buildings, how narrow the streets, how tiny was the house we grew up in. The nostalgic golden age of our youth probably never existed at all except as an over-idealized dream constructed in our minds in a moment of loneliness and dread when yearning for another time and place was easier than facing the cold, harsh realities of a new place. Going home will always force us to see the realities of our childhoods, for good or for bad, and we must examine who we think we are, which may be different than the constructed personality we present to the world on a daily basis. Going home is about facing our most base fears about our short-comings, our failings, our lost dreams. Yet going home can also be about the people who made us who we are today, who shaped us, who educated us, who raised us and put us the road to adulthood, who made us successful, who forged us in the flames of childhood, once and for all times, making us who we are today. Going home is about looking in a mirror, darkly, and taking a good, long look at the truth about ourselves, and that might not be entirely a bad thing at all.
Category Archives: identity
On going home
What do you consider “home”? The place you grew up? Where you went to school? Or were you a wandering soul that never put down roots? “Home” is a very difficult concept to define with any kind of objectivity or certainty. I would love to idealize this all out of proportion, but that would be too easy. The truth of the matter is highly complex and chaotic. One can spend an inordinate amount of time in a place and never feel at home, but even just a few days might suffice to convince you that a new place is really where your heart is at. I think that home must have something to do with the heart or the soul or some other ephemeral and subjective criteria that is completely irrational and totally inexplicable. We know we are home when we get there, and we also know when we are long way from home. Perhaps the concept of home is forged in our hearts when we are young and impressionable, when we are vulnerable and need protecting, forged by a sturdy roof over our heads and a warm meal on the table where we are always welcome any time of the day or night. Or maybe it’s none of that. At some point in our lives we forge an identity, we come to recognize ourselves as proceeding from some place, and when asked where we are from, we name a place. We spend most of our lives leaving home, moving out, living far away, yearning for that comfort and safety that we felt as children when we were being watched over. The nostalgia we feel for home is never felt so keenly as when we most go to some place foreign for work or school or whatever avatars and caprices befall one in the normal course of a life. We spend all of our time trying to get away from home, remake our identifies as adults, take our philosophies new and unknown places, make a living, create a new home for our family in an unfamiliar setting. And we live our lives far away from our homes. I often get the feeling that contemporary society is less and less concerned with a person’s hometown, an idea which is being washed away by the increasing mobility of every level of society. Many, many people no longer identify any place as home, which makes me wonder, have we gained a more universal identity or have we lost something very essential, something important. Paradoxically, going home is a risky venture if there ever was one. One is a child at home, and as one moves away, one establishes a new identity, but as we go back, we put on our old clothes and become a child again. Of course, we also run the risk of realizing how small our home town really is, how short the buildings, how narrow the streets, how tiny was the house we grew up in. The nostalgic golden age of our youth probably never existed at all except as an over-idealized dream constructed in our minds in a moment of loneliness and dread when yearning for another time and place was easier than facing the cold, harsh realities of a new place. Going home will always force us to see the realities of our childhoods, for good or for bad, and we must examine who we think we are, which may be different than the constructed personality we present to the world on a daily basis. Going home is about facing our most base fears about our short-comings, our failings, our lost dreams. Yet going home can also be about the people who made us who we are today, who shaped us, who educated us, who raised us and put us the road to adulthood, who made us successful, who forged us in the flames of childhood, once and for all times, making us who we are today. Going home is about looking in a mirror, darkly, and taking a good, long look at the truth about ourselves, and that might not be entirely a bad thing at all.
On the rose
The rose is a transcendental metaphor that exists outside of its velvety petals, thorns, dark green leaves. Whether the rose is just a flower, or something else, goes way beyond its meaning as a simple plant. In fact, there is nothing simple about either the word or the plant. The iconic existence of this flower reaches into the darkest part of the human soul as a metaphor for the transient nature of beauty, the impossibility of fooling the clock, and the ineffable nature of sublime experiences. The inner nature of the rose hints at the mystic, if not mundane, nature of symbols and how they invade the hermeneutic horizon of any given moment in which meaning is being generated. The rose is logos in its most primitive form. The sign of the sign, the inherent, if not obvious, signifier which means signifier, the rose means signified. The rose signifies a meta-signified symbol metonymy that may or may not mean anything more than a bit of nature that arbitrarily signifies beauty, love, aesthetics, youth, and an almost unlimited host of other things. We give roses because they are beautiful and because they will not last. The rose’s beauty is transient and a symbol of the finite nature of all physical beauty. The rose is, then, a piece of tragic irony because it invests all life, all creatures, all humans with meaning. Juliet understood that some things, some people, transcend their names, and that names do not always square with the thing, person, being signified. Nothing lasts, nothing stays the same, everything changes, even change. The fact that all flesh will eventually pass away is a universal truth that is reflected in the short-lived flesh of the rose. We give roses because like the human being, we can only face our mortality when we see it reflected in another living thing–even a thorny plant. The aesthetic of the rose, the petals, the fragrance, the velvety texture of the dark red flower, the painfully sharp thorns adorning the stem, the innocuous green leaves, form a whole which is both contradictory and unifying, hard and soft, round and pointy, fragrant and gritty, iconic, but all of that is undergirded by the promise of corruption and decay. The beauty can only be beautiful because it cannot last, born into corruption, the perfect rose blossom will always only ever point to the end of existence, a musty, off-purple, decadent flower that represents death, dying and corruption. The rose is at once a symbol of birth, death, and resurrection, replicating the human experience in its most basic form. As we observe the rose, we are also observing ourselves since the rose is the image, imago, of the human form–birth, youth, middle-age, old age, and death. What we see in the rose and its short life is our own mortality, but we also see the beauty of nature that exists outside of ourselves, that there is something beautiful outside of ourselves. Yet, the rose, feminine, anonymous, unknown, transcendent is inscrutable and silent, a sphinx, unwilling to ever reveal its secrets. The name of the rose, whether post-modern or medieval, is unknowable and undiscoverable. The mystery of the rose cannot be divined in any sense because it transcends all realities and all simulacra. A rose is a rose is a rose only if it is never a rose which means that the essence of the rose is larger than any given rose that might grow in your garden, which is anecdotal. In the end it is a fight between the thorns and the fragrance, a paradox of that which is sublimated by the beauty of the flower that has no function, does no work, has no reason for existing unless it is to produce more flowers, more flowers that mean everything but produce nothing.
On the rose
The rose is a transcendental metaphor that exists outside of its velvety petals, thorns, dark green leaves. Whether the rose is just a flower, or something else, goes way beyond its meaning as a simple plant. In fact, there is nothing simple about either the word or the plant. The iconic existence of this flower reaches into the darkest part of the human soul as a metaphor for the transient nature of beauty, the impossibility of fooling the clock, and the ineffable nature of sublime experiences. The inner nature of the rose hints at the mystic, if not mundane, nature of symbols and how they invade the hermeneutic horizon of any given moment in which meaning is being generated. The rose is logos in its most primitive form. The sign of the sign, the inherent, if not obvious, signifier which means signifier, the rose means signified. The rose signifies a meta-signified symbol metonymy that may or may not mean anything more than a bit of nature that arbitrarily signifies beauty, love, aesthetics, youth, and an almost unlimited host of other things. We give roses because they are beautiful and because they will not last. The rose’s beauty is transient and a symbol of the finite nature of all physical beauty. The rose is, then, a piece of tragic irony because it invests all life, all creatures, all humans with meaning. Juliet understood that some things, some people, transcend their names, and that names do not always square with the thing, person, being signified. Nothing lasts, nothing stays the same, everything changes, even change. The fact that all flesh will eventually pass away is a universal truth that is reflected in the short-lived flesh of the rose. We give roses because like the human being, we can only face our mortality when we see it reflected in another living thing–even a thorny plant. The aesthetic of the rose, the petals, the fragrance, the velvety texture of the dark red flower, the painfully sharp thorns adorning the stem, the innocuous green leaves, form a whole which is both contradictory and unifying, hard and soft, round and pointy, fragrant and gritty, iconic, but all of that is undergirded by the promise of corruption and decay. The beauty can only be beautiful because it cannot last, born into corruption, the perfect rose blossom will always only ever point to the end of existence, a musty, off-purple, decadent flower that represents death, dying and corruption. The rose is at once a symbol of birth, death, and resurrection, replicating the human experience in its most basic form. As we observe the rose, we are also observing ourselves since the rose is the image, imago, of the human form–birth, youth, middle-age, old age, and death. What we see in the rose and its short life is our own mortality, but we also see the beauty of nature that exists outside of ourselves, that there is something beautiful outside of ourselves. Yet, the rose, feminine, anonymous, unknown, transcendent is inscrutable and silent, a sphinx, unwilling to ever reveal its secrets. The name of the rose, whether post-modern or medieval, is unknowable and undiscoverable. The mystery of the rose cannot be divined in any sense because it transcends all realities and all simulacra. A rose is a rose is a rose only if it is never a rose which means that the essence of the rose is larger than any given rose that might grow in your garden, which is anecdotal. In the end it is a fight between the thorns and the fragrance, a paradox of that which is sublimated by the beauty of the flower that has no function, does no work, has no reason for existing unless it is to produce more flowers, more flowers that mean everything but produce nothing.
On crumbs
Would the world really function if it were not for the crumbs we scatter hither and yon as we eat our bread? I know that I’ve had a great meal if the crumbs dot the around my plate as if they chickens were eating there. Crumbs speak to our existential doubts about life, the world, and all the rest. By contemplating our crumbs we are reaffirmed as to who we are, that we are alive, and that time passes, moving to a lower level of energy, always to a lower energy. Bread is particularly important, whether it be actual bread, bread or a metaphor for all that we do, say, eat, create, sing, compose, paint, write, bake, cook, or imagine. Man may not live by bread alone, but bread is always a good start for creating new crumbs. I am forever brushing crumbs off of my shirt, but not because I’m a slob (well maybe a little), but because the crumbs represent the creative process through the consumption of that which has already been created. Crumbs are the outpouring overflow that comes from the fires of creation, an ongoing process for the active, happy mind that can find no rest unless it is building, painting, conducting, or rhyming something new. We are nothing if we are not the very crumbs which we drop all around us. One must become the crumbs, unafraid of being wiped up or swept away. In the creative process, crumbs will fly everywhere, and there will be those who gather around you to pick at your crumbs. The active mind will never be content with absolute tidiness, with a stark cleanliness that denies the very existence of crumbs. Creation rises up from the ashes of crumbs, chaos, and disorder, and the creative process is always generating new crumbs as you chew your toast. Crumbs fall randomly, but instead of being a worry, we should rejoice in the serendipitous nature of where the crumbs fall or that they fall at all. Crumbs are a healthy sign of process, of movement, of creation. Neat-nicks will always feel faint and their hearts will flutter when the crumbs come raining down. There has to be more to life than worrying about crumbs, a few crumbs, testimony to a wonderful meal, of consumption, of the promise of creation, of a breaking with the status quo, of change. Crumbs are a sign of life, whereas terminal cleanliness only speaks of a disturbed and unhappy mind that cannot bear the thought of a stray crumb, cluttering up an otherwise spotless table top. There is no virtue in spotlessness, just as there is no virtue in too much clutter. Perhaps the healthy mind, the scatterer of crumbs, needs a place that is more Goldilocks in nature–not too clean, not to filthy–in order to thrive. In a sense, Goldilocks and her words are also crumbs, bits of creative energy that spin a new myth about identity, being, and truth. Without crumbs, creating and gathering them, and creating some more, we choose immobility as a mode of transportation and nothing gets done, and we plod along in our ruts, and our daily routines are dull and boring, meaningless. So as we break our bread, cut our meat, spoon our soup, spread the butter, and fork the pasta, we generate new things, new meanings, new questions, new shapes, new aesthetics, new poetics, which in turn produce new crumbs. In our crumbs we see ourselves, perhaps darkly, as if in a mirror, the perhaps more clearly, embracing both our ashes and our crumbs, in this little thing we call life.
On crumbs
Would the world really function if it were not for the crumbs we scatter hither and yon as we eat our bread? I know that I’ve had a great meal if the crumbs dot the around my plate as if they chickens were eating there. Crumbs speak to our existential doubts about life, the world, and all the rest. By contemplating our crumbs we are reaffirmed as to who we are, that we are alive, and that time passes, moving to a lower level of energy, always to a lower energy. Bread is particularly important, whether it be actual bread, bread or a metaphor for all that we do, say, eat, create, sing, compose, paint, write, bake, cook, or imagine. Man may not live by bread alone, but bread is always a good start for creating new crumbs. I am forever brushing crumbs off of my shirt, but not because I’m a slob (well maybe a little), but because the crumbs represent the creative process through the consumption of that which has already been created. Crumbs are the outpouring overflow that comes from the fires of creation, an ongoing process for the active, happy mind that can find no rest unless it is building, painting, conducting, or rhyming something new. We are nothing if we are not the very crumbs which we drop all around us. One must become the crumbs, unafraid of being wiped up or swept away. In the creative process, crumbs will fly everywhere, and there will be those who gather around you to pick at your crumbs. The active mind will never be content with absolute tidiness, with a stark cleanliness that denies the very existence of crumbs. Creation rises up from the ashes of crumbs, chaos, and disorder, and the creative process is always generating new crumbs as you chew your toast. Crumbs fall randomly, but instead of being a worry, we should rejoice in the serendipitous nature of where the crumbs fall or that they fall at all. Crumbs are a healthy sign of process, of movement, of creation. Neat-nicks will always feel faint and their hearts will flutter when the crumbs come raining down. There has to be more to life than worrying about crumbs, a few crumbs, testimony to a wonderful meal, of consumption, of the promise of creation, of a breaking with the status quo, of change. Crumbs are a sign of life, whereas terminal cleanliness only speaks of a disturbed and unhappy mind that cannot bear the thought of a stray crumb, cluttering up an otherwise spotless table top. There is no virtue in spotlessness, just as there is no virtue in too much clutter. Perhaps the healthy mind, the scatterer of crumbs, needs a place that is more Goldilocks in nature–not too clean, not to filthy–in order to thrive. In a sense, Goldilocks and her words are also crumbs, bits of creative energy that spin a new myth about identity, being, and truth. Without crumbs, creating and gathering them, and creating some more, we choose immobility as a mode of transportation and nothing gets done, and we plod along in our ruts, and our daily routines are dull and boring, meaningless. So as we break our bread, cut our meat, spoon our soup, spread the butter, and fork the pasta, we generate new things, new meanings, new questions, new shapes, new aesthetics, new poetics, which in turn produce new crumbs. In our crumbs we see ourselves, perhaps darkly, as if in a mirror, the perhaps more clearly, embracing both our ashes and our crumbs, in this little thing we call life.
On Chuck Norris
Where do you start with a guy who is not a guy but a very strange caricature of a guy? There is a whole sub-genre of Chuck Norris jokes: Chuck Norris is so tough he makes onions cry. (I didn’t say they were good jokes.) I mean, I don’t doubt his sincerity as a person, but thinking that just brute force and a black and white ethic about good and evil in the world will serve you in all situations is a little disingenuous. I have always wondered if he actually believes the stuff he says or if he takes himself seriously. Don’t get me wrong, his movies are really entertaining if you aren’t worried about plot, story, verisimilitude, acting, or reality, and the only thing you care about is watching Chuck kick some evil-doer’s ass. Yet, since all of his movies are the same, and even his television series is all the same, after awhile, he is not only predictable, he’s boring. But I’m not here to insult or diss Chuck Norris. He is the one with the millions of dollars, a thirty year career, and enough star power to make whatever movies he would ever care to make. His formula for hop’n chop flicks is almost infallible. Sometimes an audience does not want subtlety, a complicated plot line, artistic cinematography, incredible dialogue which discusses existential issues of human philosophy, or complex character development. Sometimes an audience just wants to see the bad guys suffer, the evil-doers foiled, the good guy get the girl, and there are no ironic, melancholy, or tragic plot twists which make everyone cry at the end. In his movies, the good guy wears a white hat, he defeats the bad guy in spite of a few set backs, and justice is served, the order of the world is restored. Yet, I wonder if such a manicheistic view of the world is necessarily a completely healthy way to live. In spite of what Chuck Norris might believe about how the world works, or how good and evil are portrayed in his movies, the world is a much more subtle place to live than he or his movies would have you believe. First, movies are not the real world–they are art and artifice, one hundred per cent, creative work that may comment on reality, but is not reality at all. Chuck Norris is an actor, of sorts, so it is his job to invent simulacra about daily life which is or can be entertaining, according to your own point of view. In the end, point-of-view is about all anyone has. Chuck’s points of view are different than mine, no doubt, but he’s the rich one, not me. His talents for making entertaining movies are multiple and varied. Gifted athletically, he can kick and punch and hit and fight in a special movie sort of way, believable but fake, a simulacrum of fighting that is not fighting or even hitting, but mostly pretending, and almost entirely phony, which is especially obvious if one were forced to watch as they filmed the scenes. He never really hits anyone at all. His stuntmen are trained to “take-a-punch” and make it seem real. So the paradox of a Chuck Norris film is palpable: he would have you think that his black and white world of good and evil may be mastered vis-a-vis his fists and feet, but it’s really all a hoax–he never really hits anyone at all. It’s all movie magic. And we all know that magic is about illusion, not telling the truth, deceiving people, dissimulating, and tricking the viewers into thinking that violence is the answer, that the evil are vanquished, that bad people do not flourish but get their just desserts. None of which is true in this complicated terrible world. Chuck Norris doesn’t read books. He stares them down until he gets the information he wants.
On mountain climbing
Seriously, just because it’s there? People climb mountains, walls, fences, and hills for various and different reasons. Some do it because they are escaping, others because they are bored, still others are trying to get some place and they don’t want to walk around the mountain to get there. I sometimes like to sit on top of a fence–the view from above can be intriguing. Mountain climbers climb because they have to do it, but once they make it to the top, what then? Many find the danger scintillating, giving them a natural high (no pun intended), or perhaps the climb is a challenge which forces them to examine their own mortality. As a child, my entire extended family would climb a hill called Silver Cliff, which is just north of Two Harbors, Minnesota on the shore of Lake Superior. There was a dirt trail on the backside of the cliff that was not too difficult to climb, but it was a challenge, and the view from up there was breathtaking. The climb was dirty and sweaty, but the best bet for success was to just climb straight up the trail. I did feel a sense of accomplishment each time I made the climb, but at heart I am not a mountain climber. Perhaps what makes mountain climbing so interesting is that sometimes, not often, a climber dies. I would not risk my life to climb a mountain, but then again, I’ll never get to see the world from the top of Mount Everest. Climbing mountains is about the adrenaline rush, about the release of dopamine. If it were only a question of pleasure, we could put the mystery of mountain climbing away, forget it forever, but climbing is a behavior that just will not go away that easily. If we isolate climbing as an innate human behavior that has been genetically wired into our brains by evolution, one has to ask the question: how does this behavior give a human an advantage in surviving into the next generation? Since not all of us are climbers, I get the feeling that this is a very special over-specialization that gave some people an advantage, perhaps to migrate, maybe to seek higher, safer ground, to hunt and pursue prey at higher ranges, to explore and to find more food or better hunting grounds. Those are the obvious benefits of being able to climb, but I suspect that it goes deeper or higher or steeper. Is mountain climbing a sign of prestige for men? Do mountain climbers have a better chance of passing on their genes before they make that one false move and fall? Does the opposite sex find mountain climbing a sign of virility or femininity or a sign of physical prowess that might ensure the passing on of good genetic material? Mountain climbing is certainly the hallmark of risk takers, that group of humans who love roller-coasters, cliff diving, scuba diving, running with the bulls, racing fast cars, exploring unmapped jungles, spelunking, sky-diving, and snake handling. I don’t get my kicks from any of those activities, so I wouldn’t know, but the few times I’ve been trapped on a roller-coaster, I have just about thrown up from the adrenaline rush, so I’ll just leave those experiences to the junkies. Mountain climbing should go against the self-preservation behavior built into every human being. We are all hard-wired for self-preservation, otherwise none of us would be here, so I guess that mountain climbing is an enigma wrapped in a conundrum shrouded in mystery.
On Robinson Crusoe
Robinson Crusoe, just as fictional a character as Don Quixote or Sherlock Holmes, has come to be just as real as Ishmael or Harry Potter. Shipwrecked and alone on a Caribbean island, Crusoe must rebuild his solitary life as an Englishman, lost in a wilderness and with no hope of rescue in the near future. The idea of living for years, abandoned and alone on an island far from civilization, is a frightening one. Most people cannot even begin to imagine what it might be like to live in isolation from all human contact. Of course, there are those who might dream of such an arrangement, but for the most part, we are gregarious and need human interaction to be happy and productive. Human interaction gives meaning and purpose to our lives. Being a “castaway” with no hope of rescue is almost as horrifying as being walled up behind a brick wall. Our literature is filled with these surreal situations which firmly address some of the deepest and darkest human fears, one of which being the fate of Robinson Crusoe: to find oneself totally alone with no hope of relief in the near future. The very term, “castaway,” seems to devalue the victim of an accident over which they may have had no control, such as shipwreck. To be a castaway is to find oneself alone and abandoned, deprived of the creature comforts, deprived of human interaction, deprived of the structures that give our lives meaning–law, commerce, culture, society, ethics, art, time, neighbors, family. The enormous challenge that the character must face is his own motivation for taking care of himself in the face of having to live absolutely alone forever. The idea of rescue is probably the only thing that stands between Crusoe and his own insanity. In other words, the hope of rescue, no matter how small, is that one little glimmer of hope that keeps the castaway from just lying down and dying where he has washed up on the shore of his desert island. What is curious about the novel and Crusoe is how he is faced with reinventing a series of technologies that he has always taken for granted: the wheel, a shovel, baskets, bottles, cooking dishes, barrels. Eventually, he will adapt what he has on the island to solve many of these sorts of problems, but he is very vexed at recreating a table and chair for himself, realizing that the skilled craftsman who create these common everyday items are very highly skilled and armed with the highly specialized tools of their trades. Alone with only a minimum of tools and raw materials, Crusoe must come to terms with his own inadequacy as a craftsman with no training and no skills. Crusoe cannot reinvent England on his island, although he tries very hard. When he is sick, he has no doctor, when he wants to make bread, he has no flour, when he needs advice, he is alone. He lives, eats, sleeps, hunts, works, and walks absolutely by himself. When the tide rises, the storms rise up, the earth shakes, the sun beats down, he must face all of these things alone. Crusoe’s levels of desperation are real and frequently bring him to tears, but the power of self-preservation is so strong and so persistent that in spite of an overwhelming sense of hopelessness, he still gets up every day and stays alive, working, eating, cleaning, planning, inventing, solving problems. Crusoe’s story is credible, verging on verisimilitude, in fact because the human spirit, even in the face of horrific odds, is indomitable and unbending, invincible as it were. Crusoe has lots of failures as he attempts to rebuild English society on his little island, but he also has many successes, growing grain, training a parrot, building his “homes.” In the end, of course, he does leave his island with his man, Friday, but he has spent almost three decades on his desert island jail.
On Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
Being just a little different can really be a big problem. The story of Rudolph is one of rejection, isolation, and marginalization that take a heavy toll on all those involved, victim and oppressors. I have never really understood why human beings have such a hard time dealing with those people (or reindeer) who are a little different. Rudolph is openly mocked by his peer group for having a red nose. This is a physical difference over which he has no control and no responsibility. Those in authority do little to stop the mocking, and even serve to make the situation a little worse by sending him home and banning him from reindeer school and the games they play. This is an old story about shame and loneliness, distrust and fear, envy and anxiety. In other words the reindeer has been openly rejected by his cohort and by the authorities placed there to keep order and teach the new reindeer. The cruelty of the situation is stunning, and although the bullies are initially rebuffed by the authority (Donner), they get what they want when Rudolph is sent away. The story of Rudolph is an allegory for those who suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as they are tormented and bullied for reasons over which they have no control and no recourse–big ears, a funny nose, red hair, short stature, skinny body, strange eyeglasses, out-of-date clothing, odd voice, overweight body. Tolerance is not promoted or practiced because authorities have often started out life as those who dish it and are very intolerant themselves. Many people, I believe, can relate to Rudolph’s plight as he runs away, believing there is no place for him in North Pole society. He is a misfit. The fact that his story has a happy ending answers few questions for those whose stories do not have happy endings. Perhaps it is the isolation and silent suffering which is so hard to take, especially when it is your peers who are taking great delight in torturing you because you are slow, or nerdy, or not cool, or not with it. You yourself know that you are really no different than anyone else, and Rudolph realizes this as well. It is his slight physical difference which makes him a monster for all who might behold him. Once society decides that he his monstrous, then his right to live freely and pursue happiness is gone, limited by prejudice and hate. Rudolph journeys off into the wilderness, another metaphor for conflict, doubt, and self-loathing, driven away by a society that cannot tolerate the individual who controls their own destiny. Society does not tolerate difference, independence, iconoclasms, or anarchy within its social borders. Though having a red nose is nothing but a cosmetic difference that has nothing to do with actual content, having a different colored anything has always been a reason to enslave, mistreat, marginalize, or repress. Apartheid was born of racial prejudice and it flourished as a bonafide social practice for decades before it was overthrown. Rudolph’s story is, then, both profound and important. It is unjust and wrong to treat anyone different just because of some physical difference which is of no importance whatsoever. The allegory of Rudolph and his nose is an important lesson for everyone, especially during the holiday season when these differences are felt so keenly. As a final note, one should remember that the misfits of the world are only misfits because of societal constructs that make them so. Exclusion is always easier than inclusion. If there is one message that all should take from the Christmas season, it must be that inclusion is good. An elf dentist named Hermy or a Klondike loner named Cornelius show much greater heart and soul by taking in Rudolph and including him in their club than those who would dismiss them because they do not conform to mainstream ideas of image and prestige.